Online Video Backup

Does anyone here use an online backup service for their videos, such as Carbonite, Mozy, Amazon S3, etc? If so, what are your opinions of the service? Is there a total upload limit and a limit per file? Does the service compress the files? I would prefer a service that doesn't compress so that there is no chance of any file corruption during the compress/decompression process. I am hoping to find a service that offers per-file transfers of at least the 16GB limit of the SDHC card I use on my Canon camera.

Does anyone here use an online backup service for their videos, such as Carbonite, Mozy, Amazon S3, etc? If so, what are your opinions of the service? Is there a total upload limit and a limit per file? Does the service compress the files? I would prefer a service that doesn't compress so that there is no chance of any file corruption during the compress/decompression process. I am hoping to find a service that offers per-file transfers of at least the 16GB limit of the SDHC card I use on my Canon camera.

Thanks in advance

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Mobile Me does this perfectly. 20GB plus extensions if you want. It's $100 USD a year.

Uploading HD or even DV video files to MobileMe, or any other back up site, can take forever depending on your internet connection speed. I would recommend a external hard drive. They are more money but in my opinion much better, and worth it. For regular file back-ups the sites and MobileMe are fine but for huge video files, I would stay away from that bandwidth hog. Look at G-Technology and CalDigit for Final Cut and iMovie files. And do you realize how small 16GB of data transfer a month is, especially with video? And the 20GB on MobileMe is just over an hour and a half of DV footage. I don't think that is very suitable.
MobileMe does not compress files and allows 200GB of data transfer a month on an individual account of 20GB. I use my MM account for documents and images I can transport through my different computers without using a USB drive.

Does anyone here use an online backup service for their videos, such as Carbonite, Mozy, Amazon S3, etc? If so, what are your opinions of the service? Is there a total upload limit and a limit per file? Does the service compress the files? I would prefer a service that doesn't compress so that there is no chance of any file corruption during the compress/decompression process. I am hoping to find a service that offers per-file transfers of at least the 16GB limit of the SDHC card I use on my Canon camera.

Thanks in advance

Click to expand...

As mentioned you'll probably find external hard drives more suitable for large files unless you have a fast upload connection. I shoot 720p HD video but in 5-10min clips at a time, this keeps my file sizes smaller, max 500MB's.

Mozy works quite well. I've been using them for a couple of years. The only problem is they limit upload speed to 768Kbs (recent policy change). Too slow for lots of video uploads.

I tried out Carbonite recently but they sucked big time. I only tried them because I read some positive reviews, turns out Carbonite likes to post fake reviews as exposed by David Pogue. Their upload speed was slightly faster but only for the first few GB's, then it would hang all the time on my uploads. The software is designed for dummies which I didn't like. Their support is terrible, every email I sent returned a canned response which kept assuming I was on PC even though they have a different email address for Mac users. I do not recommend using them.

In summary, if you have a lot of files, go external hard drive. Mozy is ok for smaller upload batches. Amazon S3 is the blue ribbon solution but I found the cost prohibitive for large amounts of data, price out 50GB/month.

Does anyone here use an online backup service for their videos, such as Carbonite, Mozy, Amazon S3, etc? If so, what are your opinions of the service? Is there a total upload limit and a limit per file? Does the service compress the files? I would prefer a service that doesn't compress so that there is no chance of any file corruption during the compress/decompression process. I am hoping to find a service that offers per-file transfers of at least the 16GB limit of the SDHC card I use on my Canon camera.

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